


A Gravedigger's Undoing

by morituritesalutant



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: (I promise it's not too dark and funny at times), (it's got it all), Angst with a Happy Ending, Depression, M/M, Magic Realism, Misunderstandings, Not Actually Unrequited Love, POV Sam Wilson, Past Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Past Riley/Sam Wilson, Pining, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sam Wilson Can Talk to Birds, Sharing A Tent, Sharing a Bed, Suicidal Thoughts, Survivor Guilt, Swearing, Touch-Starved, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, alternative universe
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-02
Updated: 2018-04-29
Packaged: 2019-02-27 07:09:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13243116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morituritesalutant/pseuds/morituritesalutant
Summary: aka the adventures of Han Solo, a gravedigger without a grave to dig and an optimistic guide to death.Sam Wilson is dealing with his untreated trauma by isolating himself in the middle of nowhere."It doesn’t matter that his therapist hadn’t actually advised him to become a hermit. Or that she had actually said that distancing himself from the world only meant he was running away.Now he’s stuck with no reception and no internet in the New England countryside, which is basically Canada but with less moose and more witch hunting. And probably more fucking birds too."It all changes when a hiker arrives, weary, handsome and in search of an unmarked grave.





	1. Spring

**Author's Note:**

> warning for suicidal ideation throughout the story.  
>  Rating might jump up to mature in chapter 4, I have yet to decide.
> 
> Betaed by the lovely and wonderful [Jewel](http://archiveofourown.org/users/jewel). You make everything better.

_“Besides, all the many things that have been said about god and death are just stories, and this is another one.” _

— **José Saramago** , Death with Interruptions

 

* * *

 

Sam had only wanted some peace and quiet, but no one told him how many birds from hell there are in the country side.   
It’s clear he has repressed the memories of his childhood and the many summers he spent at the cottage.  
With good reason. Even the seagulls at Coney Island weren’t as chatty as the warblers are.

Sparrows, however, are without a doubt the worst. They get themselves involved in everything.   
They especially seem to enjoy commenting on Sam’s semi-naked yoga in the morning, which yes, admittedly he does in the garden. Outside.  
In his underwear.  
But he honestly thought there was no one there to judge him, but then the birds came.  
  
It’s basically a Hitchcock movie.

Also the internet lied to him, again, yoga is not doing anything for his semi-untreated PTSD. It’s done a lot for his flexibility though, so he’s kept it up.  
  
He can’t even call his therapist to say that moving away from the city for awhile to find his grounding was the worst idea on earth.   
It doesn’t matter that she hadn’t actually advised him to become a hermit.   
Or that she had actually said that distancing himself from the world only meant he was running away.  
  
The alternative was worse. Longing for everything to be quiet for once.  
He had been afraid that the only way to finally silence all the thoughts and the sounds and the panic was to— 

Anyhow.

  
Now he’s stuck with no reception and no internet in the New England countryside, which is basically Canada but with less moose and more witch hunting. And probably more fucking birds too.  
  
So yeah, maybe he’s losing it a little bit, but only occasionally and much less than he expected, taking into account the whole semi-(un)treated PTSD thing. Except for continuous annoyance with life-mingling birds, Sam is doing better than he thought he would.   
  
The first three weeks he had just laid in bed. But then the food ran out and with there being no way to contact the outside world, he couldn’t order anything in.  
  
He had been forced to hike back to the village and then hike all the way back carrying the groceries.  
All of that, while being criticised by a falcon that saw him sighing and sweating his way back up again.  
He can’t even snow-white the stupid birds into helping him.  
  
He should consider getting a donkey.

It would fit nicely in the small stable next to the cottage.  
He wonders why his parents bought the house so many years ago. But he's happy they did, he likes it a lot.  
It’s stern and inviting at the same time. Fake wood on the outside, 'rustic' (probably also fake) stonewalls on the inside. The ceilings are a little too low, but the windows let enough light in, giving the rooms a warm and cosy feeling.  
  
He tries _not_ to be honest with himself and acknowledge that his existence here is in many ways the purest form of escapism (he _literally_ escaped the city after all) and that it is no long term solution.  
Nor will he admit that he gave in to the desire not to grieve but instead to look for a place where time never passes.

He still stays in bed for most hours of the day, but he also spends some days hiking like he used to when he was a teenager.   
The only consistent thing he does is spending hours having imaginary conversations with himself.  
  
_If only others could hear it,_ Sam often thinks, for he’s truly coming up with great and witty replies to the other Sam in his head, who’s a huge loser, obviously.  
  
He’s winning every discussion on the necessity of health care. He should probably write some of it down.   
Send an op-ed to the New York Times. Get discovered as an upcoming talent. Write an autobiography.

He eats with little joy. He knows he's lost weight, too much of it, his shirts hang lose around him.   
That’s the actual reason he does yoga in his underwear. His pants kept slipping down, creating another source of ridicule for the birds around him. He had shouted back that they were just jealous of him being so ruggedly handsome.  
  
But he hasn’t looked in a mirror since he arrived. Even shaves without one. And the only reason he hasn’t grown a beard of depression is because shaving was important to his father, to appear put together and neat, whatever the circumstances.

He thinks he could handle it, living here, but secretly he’s not entirely sure whether the idea of never returning or forever staying gives him the most anxiety.  
  
Most days pass well and nothing remarkable happens.

* * *

 

Yet like many a story, the daily rhythm of our hero’s life is broken when a tall handsome stranger arrives. Actually, he’s of average height and has pretty nasty hair.

The stranger is dressed too warmly for the long hike to Sam’s house. He wears a glove on his left hand and carries a backpack and a large duffel-bag, but he’s not sweating as much as Sam would.   
  
Sam’s definitely considering the donkey more seriously.

He wonders for a brief moment if this guy is here to kill him, but dismisses the paranoid thought. As far as Sam knows he’s never had any interaction with less than legal organisations (let’s keep the FBI out of this) and he hasn’t made any enemies. 

Besides, he doesn’t think hired hit-men normally looked so depressed. Perhaps the sad-eyed stranger is also looking for a retreat away from the city.

“You seem a little warm there, friend,” Sam says, but his unused voice is too soft and raspy to be heard by the other man.  
  
The stranger looks around him, an undefinable expression on his face.  
He doesn’t seem to notice Sam sitting between the sunflowers in front of the house.  
He approaches the cottage from the side, slowly, carefully, like a cat approaches its prey.

Now that the stranger is closer, Sam can see that he's dressed in a peculiar way.   
He seems dressed for someone else, like he believes this is how he should look but doesn’t feel comfortable in his own skin.  
  
He doesn’t fit, as if he’s being multiple people at the same time. Suit that is straight out of the 1940s, but his hair is all wrong, it’s too long to fit the era and his eyes are too old and his body is too tired.

Sam eyes the man suspiciously.

When Sam coughs the man continues to ignore him.  
Sam coughs a little louder, but still nothing. He practically sounds like he’s choking now, but still the man stares at the house as though it holds the key to all the questions he has.

_Very well,_ Sam thinks, _I will try my hand at normal human interaction._

“So, uh, who are you?” Sam says.  
  
The stranger’s head jerks up, finally noticing Sam and the sunflowers. He exhales loudly, as though he's preparing himself for something.

“My name is James,” the stranger named James starts. His voice is much higher than Sam expected it would be.   
Something in the way he tilts his head and hesitates, makes Sam believe that he’s not actually called James.  
  
Sam doesn’t care. He’s a little curious, but he doesn’t care. Obviously.

“They say,— I mean, I’m...“ James starts, swallowing words down like he isn’t used to talking, something they have in common. His eyes look everywhere but at Sam’s gaze.

“I’m searching for a grave,” James continues. 

_Eery_ , Sam thinks. _No_ to normal human interaction then.

“A grave they say a dead man may one day rise from,” he continues softly.

_Well_ , he’s definitely not entirely there, and a bit too poetic for Sam’s taste, but there's no need to be impolite.

“You’re in the wrong continent buddy.”

James head jerks up once more, finally returning the eye-contact. He frowns, disappointed perhaps, like he expected Sam to look different. Rude.

“Wow. We got one with humor here,” he snarks back, but his tone is off, like he isn’t used to people making fun of him nor joking back himself.

"No need to be jealous, we can’t all be gifted like me,” Sam replies with a wink. And James stares some more. 

This must be the strangest conversation Sam has had with anyone, ever, and James looks back at him similarly flabbergasted.

The sparrow comments from above on the awkwardness. 

“Oh, shut up!” Sam shouts and immediately claps his hand before his mouth. Now he has become the crazy one —well, crazier. Better not admit he can sometimes understand birds.

“So uh,” Sam starts. “Looking for Jesus huh?”

“Not exactly. Someone far more annoying,” James says with a sadness called heartbreak in his eyes and Sam’s not cruel by nature, so he invites him in.

* * *

 

Sam does not like James. In fact he’s never met a ruder (so terribly rude!) not-funny and absolutely not-handsome man in his life before.

And what the hell is wrong with him? Inviting a complete stranger into his house, who's clearly on Sam’s side of the mental-health stability scale, somewhere in the minus.   
Sam wouldn’t even invite himself into the cottage if their paths crossed.  
Must be the loneliness of his hermit-existence getting to him. _See_ , he knew the birds were bad company.

At first James had followed Sam into the house politely, thanking him even, and into the tiny kitchen of Sam’s cute cottage.   
Even commenting on how cute it was. Which it is, very cute.  
  
(Cute was perhaps not the exact word James used, maybe ‘picturesque’ was closer too it. But whatever. James is too poetic for his own good, that’s something Sam has already concluded after knowing him for ten annoying minutes).

After having declined tea, but expressing his preference for coffee, James had started going through the cupboards like he owned the place. Truly the strangest stranger Sam has ever met.

“You got any yellow food?” he asks Sam, looking up from down by the sink. The water overflows the kettle that Sam is filling and he quickly turns the tap off.   
  
Sam can only think about how naïve he was to believe that he could not be shocked again by James and his peculiar behaviour.

“Yellow food?”

“Yeah, you know, bananas, lemons, pears, specific kind of apples. Some potatoes probably, —“

“Okay, okay, I get it. Yellow food.”

And James has the audacity to look at Sam as though he’s the slow one.

“I got some pasta?” Sam answers and James nods slowly, yellow enough apparently.

Another 15 minutes later James is sitting across Sam at the table, eating a plate of pasta (not eating anything else with it, just pasta boiled to mush. At least eat it _al dente_ for God’s sake!) and sipping his coffee.  
A color in liquid he doesn’t appear to have a problem with, but then again, he does close his eyes every time he drinks it.

James takes up a lot of space in the kitchen. He fills it to its brim with his presence.   
Sam wouldn’t necessarily argue that he's a small man himself, but James is another story all together.  
The fluidness of his steps hides his bulk.  
But now that he has taken his jacket off, it shows that his dress shirt is stretched to a max.  
He makes for an impressive figure.  
  
Sam flexes his own biceps. He sees James’ gaze linger.  
He's still got it, thank God.

Distracted, Sam has burned his tongue on his own tea (chamomile, to calm his nerves. The internet said it would work and the internet is always right).   
He continues to stare.  
He knows he's disappointing his mother by being so crass, but he has given up on all social rules of behavement— _fuck_ , behaviour, whatever!  
James is distracting enough he’s influencing Sam’s mental vocabulaire. 

“So...,” Sam starts again.

“You gonna start all your sentences with so?” James responds.

“You gonna be rude to the one that feeds you?” Sam snaps back.

“This is terrible pasta,” James answers, proving Sam’s point. Probably on purpose, that bastard.

“Of course it’s terrible, you didn’t add anything too it!” Sam huffs, “not even a bit of garlic, I mean, come on. Or oil, or cheese, or, I don’t know — corn, all yellow!”

“Corn with pasta sounds disgusting.” James grins, pasta falls out of his mouth.   
It should not be sexy. But it is, a little bit. Sam will deny everything.  
  
“And not everyone has an obsession with garlic.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

James nods towards the many many garlic-braids hanging on the wall of the kitchen.

“That’s for decoration,” Sam says with indignation.

_Are they?_ James’ eyebrows say back.

“Oh fuck off,” and James has the audacity to look pleased.

“So,” Sam starts once more, James’ eyebrows continue to mock him.

“When you say you’re looking for a grave--”

“Well, a corpse, technically,” James interrupts.

“Right. A corpse technically,” Sam continues ( _what the hell._ Technically should not be in that sentence), "what exactly do you mean by that?”

James pushes his empty plate to the side.   
The teasing --if slightly psychotic-- atmosphere is instantly replaced by something serious and sad.  
Sam regrets his question immediately, but he asked, so he has to listen to the answer.

“A man was buried up in the mountains,” James answers, his eyes piercing right through Sam’s soul. Blue like the sky high above Sam’s favourite mountain on early spring day.  
The color is terribly lovely.  
  
Sam entertains the thought of what James might make of him. But he remembers the disappointment on James’ face when he saw Sam. So he shuts it down and listens.

“And I,” he swallows loudly, “I’m looking for someone who can take me there. Who knows the way up the mountains.”

James grasps the duffel bag from next to him on the floor and swings it onto the kitchen table.  
The plate jangles.

“I’ll pay you, of course. But in the village they said you might know where this grave is,” James’ breath shudders, like he’s scared about the outcome.  
It seems strange, for he doesn’t appear to be the kind of man that fears anything, it seems more likely that people would be scared of him instead.

He zips the bag open.

“When I saw you, you looked familiar. You looked like you would understand."

Sam can only stare at the money in the bag. Who eats a stranger’s bland pasta when you have this kind of wealth?

Sam can’t even fault him the cryptic poeticism of his words, because he knows what grave James is speaking of. 

He’s gone hiking up the mountains with his father many times.   
(It was probably some kind of coming of age-ritual slash father-son-bonding event now that he looks back on it).  
But only a few times did they decide on the two week-long hike to visit the nameless gravestone.  
  
Folks in the village used to say a plane crashed there, back in World War Two. But anyone who might remember, is gone.  
Sam always thought it was strange, that the plane crushed on the way home.  
  
He recalls there is no actual grave, the stone was only placed there to memorize those who had passed in the crash higher up the mountains.  
But no one ever came to remember them, the only ones that passed by occasionally were hikers.  
And there was especially no 'corpse, technically’.  
  
He doesn’t tell James any of this.

There had been times he had wondered which name belonged on the gravestone but never had he ever thought that one day a white man with greasy hair would ask him to take him there. 

“All right.” Sam says and wonders again what is wrong with him.   
What did his therapist call it again? _  
‘An obsessive search for danger because you can’t handle feeling safe.’_

Sam finds that he doesn’t care.

James looks at him incredulously, like he had at no point travelling to the cottage and talking to Sam actually expected Sam to agree with him.

The silence is heavy with relief and something unspoken.

“You’re not going to ask me any more questions?”

_I want to die most of the time,_ Sam suddenly feels like saying.

“Nah, dude,” Sam replies instead, “didn’t feel like you wanted me to.”

James nods in thanks.

“You’re not afraid of me?” he says the moment Sam has turned to the sink to get himself a plate of that tasteless disgusting mushy pasta.  
  
The plate falls. Shards and penne mix on the floor.Sam stares at it.  
He’s been doing too much staring today, that’s for sure.  
  
He wants to ground to swallow him whole and it seems the only thing that he isn’t scared of, is James.  
  
Instead, he feels familiar.

“You’re definitely not helping your case,” Sam says strained, he turns back around facing James and the bag with too much money in it. He doesn’t know why, but he starts laughing. It’s a bit too hysterical to be real, but close enough.  
  
“Should I be?” He asks and Sam can’t believe how flirty he made that sound. Truly, _what_ is wrong with him.

James’ eyes are wide and large. The corners of his mouth twists. His left arm twitches. He drinks his coffee without closing his eyes.

* * *

 


	2. Summer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Head the warnings throughout the story! If you have any concerns, please let me know :)

It takes Sam a week to prepare their trip. It’s the first time he doesn’t have his father to take care of it.   
Perhaps this is what being an adult feels like. Sam’s not a fan.  
  
Getting food supplies in the color yellow is without a doubt the hardest part.

He suddenly feels something inside of him (not showing on the outside obviously, although in the mornings— you know what, never mind about that) that he hasn’t in a long time. He doesn’t recognize it at first, like James doesn’t recognize the emotion joy and is surprised every time he smiles. It makes Sam’s soul ache in a yearnful way.  
  
It’s the feeling of having a purpose.

He wants to kiss James for that alone. And for other reasons that he doesn’t speak of and prefers to ignore. After all in two weeks their arrangement will be over. They haven’t even spoken about the way back yet and perhaps there is none: Sam avoids the topic.

Living with James has been remarkably easy. And by easy Sam means absolutely horrible and fantastic at the same time.

James drinks milk directly from the carton (it doesn’t matter that Sam does that with OJ, not a relevant fact here), he makes snide remarks about everything Sam does, ‘accidentally’ switches the sugar with salt in Sam's tea and grins.  
He has the most stupid handsome grin on earth.   
He brushes their shoulders together and trails the cold fingers of his right hand over Sam’s warm arms, heated from working in the sun outside.  
  
He seeks Sam’s touch but flees it when returned, like an untamed fox: curious but circumspect.  
  
After two days Sam can’t handle the greasy hair anymore. He suggests a cut, or at least a wash.  
James agrees, hesitantly.

"It will look better, for later.” James makes a lot of ominous comments like that.

“It will look better now as well,” Sam says.   
  
James huffs.

“Still jealous you got no sense of humor?” Sam shouts to him,  while walking to his room  to get a towel.

For some reason his ears momentarily stop working and he doesn’t hear James’ reply. How strange. Probably wasn’t very funny anyway.  
The nightingale in his window makes a snark comment about flirting being equal to offending someone on purpose and Sam ignores him as well.

He has other things on his mind: he’s curious to see what James will look like. With a haircut perhaps the layers of grime and worry will awash away too. One can only hope.

  
It doesn’t go well. At all.

James sits down in the bathroom on one of the squeaky chairs he seems to love. He always chooses it when they eat breakfast.

James is always making sounds, chewing too loudly, huffing, choosing chairs that practically talk: perhaps it’s his way to ensure he won’t dissolve into nothing, but let’s be honest, it’s probably to annoy Sam.  
  
Sam stands closely behind him and carefully drapes the towel over his shoulders.

He softly brushes James's hair to the back, James closes his eyes momentarily and Sam feels a surge of victory go through him.  
He’s about to ask how James wants it, when he accidentally touches the back of James’ neck.

The other man shoots out of the chair and before Sam can blink, he hears the backdoor slam and James is gone.

Sam is only left with guilt and an empty house. He should have known better, touch chased the fox away.

His stomach turns and his hands are sweaty. Why are his hands so sweaty suddenly? Has he always sweated so much?

He curses his own stupidity.  
  
He has studied James and has recognised their similarities in all the different ways he moves.  
Maybe James is not a vet, but he’s clearly been traumatised.  
He checks every room a couple of times a day and eats only yellow food, like Sam believes he can talk to birds, sleeps on the floor instead of his mattress most nights and believes he killed Riley.

James stays away for a day.  
The bag of money remains on the table, so Sam assumes their deal hasn’t changed.  
It doesn’t give him any comfort and Sam doesn’t get any sleep,the whole night he paces and paces.  
He prefers nightmares to this, for nightmares at least he can escape. Guilt he never could.  
  
But there's another feeling he can’t handle quite yet.  
He isn’t ready to form the thought, but we know: he wants James to stay.

* * *

“My name is Bucky,” the man formerly known as James says when he returns. 

Sam wants to hug him, but just says “okay,” because this time Bucky sounds honest and young, too young to be wearing another name. 

“Sam,” Sam adds, suddenly realizing he hasn’t introduced himself yet to Bucky after living together for more than a week.   
( _Again_ : _What the fuck is wrong with him?_ )  
  
Bucky’s face betrays the same thought and same realization. He tries to control the grin on his face.

He fails terribly. They make quite a team.

Sam starts laughing again. It’s soft, and mostly to himself, but it’s there. He doesn’t think he has laughed this much in his whole life, never mind the last two years since he’s been back.

He knows it’s mostly about the absurdity of the situation, but it’s also relief. 

Bucky stares at him again, like he’s trying to decipher who Sam is and what on earth motivates him, like he doesn’t get it. Like he’s never come across an enigma with a gap between his teeth.

Bucky walks into the house and Sam follows him without question. He goes right to the kitchen and starts eating cornflakes directly out of the box. The crunches fill the room and it only mildly annoys Sam.

“Stop chewing with your mouth open, idiot,” Sam says, but it sounds fond instead of judgmental, like he wanted to.

Bucky starts chewing even louder and hands over the box. Sam grabs a handful of cornflakes himself and stuffs  them in his mouth, before returning it.

They chew loudly in silence. Content.  


* * *

A few days later Bucky says, midway through his piece of cornbread with butter and honey, that he would like to try again.

“I thought, maybe you could cut it like this.”   
He takes a photo out of his jacket and shows it to Sam. It’s gone yellow with age and shows a portrait of a young man. He’s classically handsome, wearing a soldier’s uniform.  
  
Sam turns the photo around, slowly.

On the back it says in pencil, _James Buchanan Barnes, 1942._ Sam softly brushes his thumb over the name.

He studies the photo and wants to ask Bucky who this is, but he already knows. Perhaps he had began to realize when Bucky arrived, asking after a Word War II grave.  
  
The man in the photo and the man before him are the same, but two eras, if not worlds apart.  
_His_ Bucky lives constantly on the verge of fight or flight, a creature of the wild.

The shadows under his eyes tell Sam so, his tense shoulders betray him, along with a patchy beard and too many silences in between his words.  
  
The _James Buchanan Barnes of 1942_ isn’t one that’s been ripped from time yet. He was a boy who had no idea what was about to happen to him.  
Sam's afraid to ask, whatever it had been, it must have been terrible. Not many things can stretch a life thin and thinner over 75 years until there's barely any of that person left.  
  
“Yeah, Bucky, I can do that.”  
  
He returns the photo. 

Sam clears his throat. “But more importantly, how do you feel about the color orange, close enough to yellow or not?”   


“Artistically or food-wise?”  Bucky says with a serious tone to his voice, considering the question, but the glint in his eye betrays his amusement.   


* * *

Their second try at a hair cut goes much better.Bucky doesn’t want to shave, says he’ll do it once “we’re there.”  
  
Sam’s disappointed. He’s watched _Skyfall_ too, you know. He often envisions himself as quite the Naomie Harris, they obviously have similar beautiful legs. And Sam might have practiced shaving on a balloon.  
Only the falcon in the backyard knows, but everyone ignores him anyway.

No sexy shaving scene for Sam then.  
  
Sam is careful not to touch Bucky’s skin and talks him through it, tells him what he is doing and when.  
  
“Just don’t touch my neck, the rest is fine.”

_The rest of him._ While it's the least he should be thinking of, Bucky’s comment sends Sam’s mind to a place of shameless fantasy. He swallows it down and thinks of his grandmother’s vegetable stew, the most disgusting memory he can come up with: it had peaches in it.  
  
But Sam can't ignore (and frankly no-one with eyes would be able to) the way Bucky's shirt stretches over his broad back, the lean lines of his neck, the freckles on his shoulders that peak out underneath his shirt.  
Most all though, it's the way Bucky's sitting in his squeaky chair, head hanging forward, trusting.  
  
It’s been a long time since anything truly stirred Sam and his honest unbroken attraction to Bucky has taken him by surprise. If only he could control his own thoughts, but they won’t fucking listen to him at all. They never do.  
  
“Make it look good,” Bucky says to Sam, looking over his shoulder to the pair of scissors.  
  
“Unfortunately I’m not a miracle worker,” Sam responds.

Dark hair falls in clumps to the ground on the white tile floor.  
  
Whatever Bucky survived, he’s here in Sam's bathroom, getting his hair cut. Willing to keep going, even if it's in the form of a gravedigger with a mission.  
He wants that too. Obviously not the gravedigging job, that sounds terribly boring (graverobbing however, that would be an entirely different case), but to have something worth living for.

Sam wishes for the first time since Riley fell that he’ll grow old, instead of die young like _James Buchanan Barnes, 1942_ did.  
  
It’s hopeful.

Once Sam’s finished, Bucky stares a long time at himself in the mirror. He looks back expectantly at Sam, waiting for something. Sam isn’t sure. Bucky often looks at him as though he’s waiting for Sam to indicate how to handle the situation.  
But Sam is just as bad as Bucky at playing human, so he only stares back.

“Your look really… neat,” he says at last.

“Thanks?” Bucky says, grinning.

“Shut up,” Sam says but can’t help grin just as widely.

* * *

 When they are finally ready to depart, Bucky refuses to change from his old-timey costume to a serious hiking outfit.

They ‘discuss’ it for 20 minutes.  
Which means that Sam tries to very calmly argue for the  pros of wearing something that will keep Bucky warm and not make his feet sore after only two hours of walking, while Bucky argues back that he managed to reach Sam’s house in this exact outfit and stubbornly refuses to listen or starts shouting random names of things he sees around them, to prevent Sam from speaking.   
_“Rhubarb, rhubarb!”_

Bucky changes his mind eventually when Sam is able to convince him that he could always change back once they arrive at the grave. This way his clothes would stay neat. (Then again, he’s been wearing them for at least a week. Probably much longer by the smell of it.)   
  
Bucky keeps the black leather glove on his left hand.

He does a lot of things Sam doesn’t understand, that Sam doesn’t ask about.

It’s not up to him.

In return Bucky doesn’t ask him why he talks to birds so much. Sam hopes Bucky assumes he’s lonely. It’s better than the truth.

Simple courtesy of ignoring each other’s ways of dealing with life.

Outside a corvid shouts _carrot, carrot_. It sounds like Bucky.

* * *

   
Sam knows of a cabin that is near the grave, but they will have to spend most of the nights in a tent.

Bucky suggests he will carry it for them. “I’m very strong," he says.

“Well, uh, good for you?” Sam comments, eyebrows practically touching his hairline.

“No,” Bucky says, again, and how is he able to express his questioning of Sam’s intelligence with a simple no?  
“You don’t understand. I’m abnormally strong.”

To prove his point he lifts the kitchen table. With his left hand. Alone. 

And with their lunch and plates and glasses and everything still on it. _Well_ , still on it before Bucky had to show his abnormally strong arm-muscles.  
  
Sam’s warning-shout is too late, everything has clattered to the ground and Sam’s ears ring.

The spell of quietness of the cottage that is so precious to him is momentarily broken.  
Nothing of note triggers something enormous inside Sam.  
  
Everything that he had worked so hard on, to control, everything that was so carefully balanced, so perfectly in place, ruined for a moment by fractured tableware.  
He stumbles back, losing his footing.  
  
“Goddamnit!” he shouts, feeling a strange kind of desperation rise in his chest. His mouth tastes sour and of bile.  
He doesn’t feel any of his limbs any more, but he notices his hands are shaking.

Bucky looks vaguely disappointed his display didn’t provoke more awe, but instead loosened rage inside of Sam that he can’t quite explain himself.   
  
Sam breathes in and out. Thinks of the stuff the therapist told him, but he can’t remember it well.  
Something along the lines of _‘Just because you cannot control a situation, it doesn't mean you need to feel helpless and angry. Let it pass, Sam, let it pass.’_  
Fucking bullshit, fucking therapy.  
  
It doesn’t pass, not for a while. Sam tries to breathe, but the air feels too thin in the kitchen.  
So thin. So vulnerable. Everything breaks so easily.  
  
Bucky doesn’t say anything. Just stands there, absolutely quiet.  
  
After some time Sam is able to tuck the panic and fear and anger away again. Hide them in the chambers of his heart close to his spine.

He returns to himself and faces the wreckage before him. Not the broken plates on the ground, but Bucky on his knees, cleaning up the mess. When did he get on his knees?  
  
He looks too vulnerable that way. His broad shoulders tense as ever.

Sam crawls next to him.  
Sam knows he will say the wrong thing if he opens his mouth, the panic has temporarily blocked his memory of what just happened.

“I apologise.” Sam breathes out.

“It’s perfectly alright.”  Bucky says. But everything from the tip of his nose to his smallest toenail tells Sam that Bucky is not okay.

“You probably shouldn’t show that to other people?” Sam starts, murmuring. “Not me, I mean, you know, I’m fine with it.”  
Sam gestures in the air as to encompass all the weird stuff that he does himself around Bucky.  
  
“But if you don’t want some shady government organisation after you, or worse, intrusive questions from vague acquaintances, you should probably _not_ do that? Or, alternatively, I recommend a career as a strong man in a circus. Seems profitable.”  
  
Both the concern and the joke fall flat.

“Right.” Bucky responds. He’s still gathering shards with his bare hand, and it’s bleeding.

“Thank you,” Sam says instead, his voice sounding too formal, distant.“I would appreciate it if you carried the tent, and some other stuff perhaps.”  
  
He wants to add ‘ _with your abnormally strong biceps,_ ’ but the cheeky flirty interactions of before seem a life time ago. Why are they both so bad at dealing with life?

“Let me know what else I can do for you,” Bucky responds in similar fashion and sometimes it seems as though he has five different people inside of him.   
  
The charming cocky kid, the grinning stranger, the traumatised soldier, the killer ready to strike and this strange distant person that Sam dislikes the most.  
But still, he can’t help but like Bucky for all that he is. Even if Sam won’t admit it out loud.

The rest of the day passes in silence. Not the good kind. 

* * *

They leave in the morning.  
Bucky looks more handsome than ever, disgruntled with his short hair sticking  out  in all directions at 5 in the morning.  
Sam swallows all the confessions  tiptoeing on his tongue.  
  
“Off we are into the great unknown!” He says instead.  
  
“Jesus, we’re doomed,” Bucky murmurs, “I thought you knew the way.”  
  
Sam locks the door behind them.  
  
The falcon is waiting for them at the beginning of the path up the mountain. Last night he told Sam he would come along.  
Not asked, informed. Meddler.

“I don’t think I’m a good person,” Sam comments, as he is truly the best at conversation starters.

“Yeah, obviously,” Bucky grins, “you were very rude to me when we first met.” He says it like it happened ages ago.

“I thought you were a religious nutcase! Or worse, an archaeologist with no sense of humor!”  
  
“Says the bird-whisperer!”  
  
Turns out Sam is good at conversation-starters, no matter how untraditional.

They never end up talking about Sam’s secrets and his bird-obsession. Bucky pretends he doesn’t see the redwinged falcon fly high above them. Instead they speak of rattlesnakes and minotaurs. Both creatures misunderstood by the world, much like Sam and Bucky.

* * *

The first day passes relatively well.As well as could be expected.  
It’s very similar to living with Bucky, being absolutely horrible and fantastic at the same time.

Half the time he’s dead silent, not saying a word. The other half of the time he’s purposely breathing too loud ( _why? solely to annoy Sam? well, it’s fucking working!_ ) and walking in front of Sam, but about half a pace too slow.  
The summer’s sun is hot above them.

By noon Sam’s feet hurt like hell and his brain is cooked and his heart is thorn between annoyance and being completely smitten.

Sam had baked a saffron  zucchini-potato pastries before they left, with lots of seasoning, all reasonably yellow enough for Bucky.  
They eat in silence and Bucky for once eats with his mouth closed.

"So what’s with the yellow food?” Sam starts. As mentioned before, he’s rather fantastic with non-awkward conversation starters about non-sensitive material and today he’s truly outdone himself.

Bucky swallows the pie slowly and takes a sip of the water from Sam’s flask.

"I can’t stomach other colors,” he finally answers, lost in thought. “Especially reds, or dark browns. They made me eat horrible things.”

The way he says horrible without any emotion, it sends shivers up Sam’s spine.

“Who made you do that, Buck?"

"Bad people,” Bucky says, biting off another piece of pastry. "But Death killed them.” 

“That tends to be the result, yeah,” Sam comments and Bucky looks at him with a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, like Sam doesn’t understand anything at all. It’s not condescending, it’s hopeless and lonely.  
  
After all, capital letters don’t show well in spoken speech.

* * *

 


	3. Autumn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings again for suicidal ideation, as well as overall feelings of depression.  
> Brief mention of vomit and also the violence that comes with the canon-typical winter soldier background story, mentions of torture (non descriptive).  
> It's still a hopeful chapter, I believe :) It's about healing.

Sam used to have a rhythm that he liked. Before, that is. The times he spent in Harlem when he wasn’t on tour.  
Wake up early, work ‘til the afternoon, eat and then do nothing for the rest of the day.

He has tried to enforce it on himself at the cottage too, but something inside had always stopped him.  
What a strange feeling when you want something, but you _can’t._

Sam’s done and not done a lot of strange things he can’t explain since he got back.  
Not eating anything sustainable for days, forgetting to shower and then suddenly following impulses, like eating five chocolate bars at once (and then not cleaning up his own vomit for days, he's especially ashamed of that one).  
He’s been a lot of things, but he’d never seen himself as impulsive before.  
  
So why? He doesn't know and hates himself for it.

Most inexplicably there's the fact that he had bought glow-in-the-dark lube a month before his hermit-existence in the countryside started. He had gotten it on impulse at Kroger, of all places, because it was on sale. _‘3 for the price of 1!!!’_  
And he had thought _‘why not?’_ right up to the moment when he regretted it immediately and then for no apparent reason brought it _with him_ to the cottage.  
  
Flavored lube already freaks him out a little bit (it’s not natural for anything to taste that chemical, least of all, you know, anything down under) so glowing lube, definitely out of the question.  
Never mind that nobody likes to be kept awake at night by their own genitals and their right hand glowing.  
It doesn't matter anyway, his libido has yet to return.

Anyhow, back to how he can’t do certain things anymore.

For strangely enough, since Sam and Bucky began their ‘journey’, something has shifted inside Sam.   
The impossible suddenly seems possible. It's like a space has been created inside his brain that allows him to do things.  
Not by himself, mind you, but thanks to some outside influence that he can’t explain, he’s able to follow his old pattern again.  
  
He wakes up early and it doesn’t take him three hours to get out of bed. Bucky’s handsome and grateful grin is the first thing that greets him in the morning. The second greeting is the falcon's morning-gift, in the form of a dead mouse dropped at his feet, and a complaint about Sam not waking up early enough to go hunting with him.  
  
The sting of sharp cold air and Bucky’s teasing slow pace make him forget about his sore muscles for a while. Make him forget to hate himself.  
He loves the surge of awe when he sees the falcon fly above a valley. He loves the sound of running water, loves breathing in tandem with Bucky, loves staring at the drops of sweat that drip down Bucky’s neck.  
It’s all so _real._  
And when they find a good spot for the night in the late afternoon, they stop for the day, feeling… satisfied?

It’s unsettling and Sam’s afraid he’ll lose this feeling and his mind will be paralysed again.   
So naturally he avoids thinking about it all together.

The first day they stop, he leaves Bucky to the tent because Bucky claims he can set it up (he can’t, even the falcon gets involved) and Sam takes care of dinner.

Sam has to save him half an hour later. 

“We have to sleep, in _there_ , together?” Bucky says once the tent is neatly in place. His voice unusually high, a little bit out of control. Surprising, since Bucky always seems to be so _in_ control, his limbs actually listening to him, even though he does have his little beady eyes.  
Beautiful ones, yes yes, Sam knows, but damn shifty.  
  
The tone of Bucky’s voice is either expressing fear or hope, Sam isn’t sure.  
And _yes_ , he also knows that those are two very different emotions, but honestly Bucky’s baritone is very shrill to his ears and Bucky’s face is very distracting to interpret correctly.

Sam wants to joke that he thought for sure Bucky had carried another tent with his ‘abnormal’ strength, but sometimes, only sometimes, he understand the possible severity of a situation.   
  
Instead he asks if it will be a problem.  
They could always go back tomorrow, get a second tent.

“No, no,” Bucky answers. “It doesn’t make me uncomfortable.”   
But still he exhales out of his nose loudly and Sam wonders what brought it on.  
  
Has he done anything to make Bucky feel weird?  
  
_Oh God,_ has he been pouring his heart out, out loud, instead of in his mind?  
  
The falcon just keeps saying ‘I know’ when Sam mentions Bucky, completely uninterested in the topic of conversation, so Sam’s been moaning to other birds.  
  
(Sam’s thinking of calling him Han, you know, because of the Millennium Falcon. Anyway.)  
  
He can’t be blamed right?  
Seriously, anybody would have noticed Bucky’s eyes in this light, it’s a completely impartial and unbiased point of view.  
Sam’s just noticing things, stuff like that, the color of people’s eyes, the pinkness of their lips. Whatever.

Eventually there is no more time to postpone the ‘tent’ and Bucky goes in first.   
Not very gracefully, he does it more in a crawling sideways movement. He lies down as far away from Sam as possible on his mat.  
He’s on his side, arms above the sleeping bag. Sam doesn’t think he’s ever seen someone this tense and miserable.  
  
Sam’s the kind of person who prefers to lie on his back and zip his sleeping bag all the way up so it looks like he’s mummified.  
Arms in.

He smells his armpits to be sure that isn’t the source of Bucky’s disgust, but it doesn’t smell too bad, considering they just hiked the whole day.

They lie on the ground with enough space between them for Jesus and even some for Maria Magdalena if she were so inclined to join them, which seems barely possible in a two person tent, but they seem to make it work somehow.

“You all right there, Buck?” Sam says, trying to keep his voice light, but his heart is trembling and so is his tongue.  
His mummified sleeping bag is preventing him from seeing Bucky properly, being forced to look up.

“I don’t remember what it’s like,” Bucky says and his voice isn’t shrill anymore, like before.  
It sounds tired. He sounds tired. Tired with the world, tired with himself.

“There being another person near me,” Bucky says, “who is kind.”  
  
Sam swallows. He can’t believe Bucky sometimes, the stuff he says. How to respond to a confession like that, when all Sam does is objectify his eyes and moan over him like a teenager to disinterested members of the _aves_ family.

“I think we established before that I’m not a good person,” Sam says, walking on a tightrope of carefully constructed balance between self-hate and resentment for the world. He jokes too much about serious things.

Sam tries to turn around to Bucky, well, shuffles is more like it, which is not very easy nor very sexy when one has mummified themselves in their sleeping bag.

Bucky has already soundlessly moved to facing Sam. _Of course he has._

His eyes tell Sam too much and Sam closes his own, unable to bear it.

“I hate the person that put that thought inside your mind," Bucky says and Sam doesn’t tell him it was Sam himself, no help from anyone else that had him spiral into months of self-hate. He deserves a sticker for self-destruction.  
  
“You deserve to be surrounded by kindness, always.”  
  
“You should have been a poet instead of a soldier,” Sam says, blushing, and somewhere inside him he thinks he had meant to say “I” instead of “you” and the way Bucky’s eyes look back at him, he seems to know.

Bucky’s face is surrounded by his dark (no longer greasy, thank you Sam) hair and he looks like the moon in a starless dark sky.   
Pale, lighting the way for nightly travellers: lovely.  
He looks so much younger and so much less mutilated by the world outside them, less soaked with sorrow.  
  
That night, or maybe it was a night a week later, or maybe it was the night before they arrived at the grave, or maybe during all of them, Bucky starts to talk.

“I don’t remember anything from before,” Bucky slowly pats his front pocket where no doubt _James Buchanan Barnes, 1942_ is hidden away.

After that Bucky keeps talking, softly in whispers and Sam doesn’t joke too much, even though the topic is so serious.  
Bucky speaks of his life story in bits and pieces, like all lives are scrambled together.  
He speaks not of  _James Buchanan Barnes, 1942,_ nor of _James—actually I go by Bucky_.  
No, he speaks of that person in between, the one they built in a lab with no name and no memories of who he was.  
  
He speaks of falling from a train, of being found by the Russians, or, was it the Germans?  
He confuses World Wars with Cold Wars and he talks about missions. Missions and more missions.  
No details of whom and where, just about how it felt: killing someone with ‘perfection’, from a distance and never missing.  
  
About Death beginning to anticipate his skills and arriving before he even pulled the trigger.  
About Death calling him _Winter_ and _Marowit_.  
  
About feeling completely desolate, about his own body belonging to others, about the rare moments of sanity and believing it sane to beg Death to end it all. About her telling him she cannot kill, not like he does.  
He speaks of that in-between-person tortured so badly even Death began to pity him eventually.  
And Death’s not supposed to feel (like anything).  
  
“What happened then?” Sam asks.  
  
Bucky doesn't say. Just utters barely recognisable whispers of being only good at one thing, voice raw with use and resentment.  
When he  mutters her name, it sounds like he's the one pitying her, but he sounds angry too, full of betrayal.

A deal with a slavic goddess is nothing at all like a deal with the christian devil. Something Sam’s father the preacher wouldn’t have believed.  
  
They drift closer to one another as the evening of their first night outside progresses, so close that Sam can count Bucky’s eyelashes and see the freckled skin beneath his patchy beard.  
Sam wants to breathe him in, understand what Bucky smells like and never forget it.  
He wants to reach out and push a few strands of hair out of Bucky's face as gently as possible. He doesn't.  
  
Jesus and Maria Magdalena have gone to find a tent of their own.

Speech turns to comfortable silence, despite the topic of conversation. Outside an owl hoots.  
The air smells clean like it does in the mountains.

Sam suddenly realises he hasn’t thought about wishing to die the whole day long and a wave of anxiety bubbles inside his stomach and throat.   
It scares him. Death has been the only one ever close to him, wherever he went.  
He understands now that Bucky might feel a similar way.  
He breathes out, deeply. And again. And again. Maybe the therapist was right after all, with all her idiotic breathing exercises.

“Hey, Buck,” Sam says, slurring a little with tiredness.

"Hmm?” Bucky answers from the edges of sleep himself.

“Could you move? Your legs are in the way.” Sam gently kicks Bucky’s feet that he somehow managed to lay diagonally across the tent.  
  
Bucky firmly kicks him back.

“No.” Bucky answers and promptly falls asleep. Maybe he’s faking it, but Sam  can’t help but grin.

* * *

The next night in the tent is both better and worse as is everything with Bucky.

They don’t talk much. Bucky has turned his back to Sam again and Bucky hasn’t mummified himself as of yet, no matter the hour long discussion they had during lunch about the pros of sleeping like that.

But Bucky’s shoulders aren’t tense the way they usually are. His chest moves steadily up and down to the rhythm of his own breath.  
He isn’t shifting in and out of reality, but is a steady presence next to Sam.

Sam stares at Bucky’s back and wants to reach out, not sure exactly what to do, to ask permission, to touch.  
He keeps his palms firmly pressed against his ribs.

A feeling is buzzing in his chest and high in his heart. One that has been there since they first met, but that Sam has stubbornly ignored.   
It's desire. Perhaps he has unlearned emotions like Bucky has and never realised that he did.  
  
Sam wants to fit his chin in between the space of Bucky’s shoulder and neck. Wrap his arms around the other man’s chest and hold on tight.

A longing of unknown shape and size is settling in his soul. Despite him believing he’s not a good person, he’s also not a bad person.

So Sam stares and longs, but doesn’t move or say a thing.

He wants Bucky, but Bucky wants the person that’s buried in a nameless grave high on the mountains.   
He hasn't said it, but why resurrect someone if not for love?  
  
Sam’s unnecessarily jealous of a someone he doesn’t know and wants to joke and ask if Death is really _that_ old-fashioned, still walking around with a scythe, and whether Bucky’s allowed to call her _Марена_ in more informal settings, them being old pals and all that.  
More terrible jokes instead of confessions of his own. It’s better sometimes not to say a thing.  
He’ll have to wait for the morning.

Sam sleeps restlessly and wakes up covered in sweat.   
  
The familiarity of nightmares had slowly weakened with his stay in the cottage, but the stress of repressed emotions has returned things to the way they used to be. When Riley fell and Sam killed him. Or was it the other way around?  
  
It’s the way Sam was before, the way he still is, but had temporarily forgotten in the silence between birdsong and good companionship.

Sam can admit he wasn’t ‘well’ in the cottage, but he was surviving nonetheless. And now, it’s almost like Bucky took a spade to _him_ , dug him open, unearthed his mind. Uncovered Riley's grave. And Sam let him.  
  
When he looks next to him, Bucky is nowhere to be seen. A pine branch lies in his place instead.   
A few cones as well. Showing autumn has arrived.

Sam slowly falls asleep again, but just before he loses consciousness, he thinks, _wait_ ,  _autumn_?

For Bucky, dear readers, had arrived on the 21st of March. In spring.   
And much later, during one of their lunches outside the cottage in between the sunflowers, he had asked Sam if they would be able to reach the grave before the first day of winter.   
Back then, Sam had assured Bucky it could easily be done, as the hike would take a maximum of two weeks.

And while sleep overwhelms him, almost like it's out of Sam’s control, he can’t help but wonder, _what if there is not enough of time, what will happen then?_

He tries to push the worry away. After all, there are a number of explanations and the cones could have come from anywhere.  
Whatever the reason, autumn's arrival remains impossible.

* * *

In the morning Sam gives Bucky couscous with fermented milk and a piece of vanilla cake drenched in lemon and orange juice.  
Their hands stick momentarily together held by sweetness.

Sam has his heart on his tongue, an easy offering. All he needs to do is dare.

Bucky looks at Sam and Sam thinks, _oh fuck,_ he knows.

“Once this ‘ _journey’_ is over,” Sam begins, hesitant, everything inside him telling him not to continue.  
He throws the falcon a piece of the cake. That will shut him up for the next ten minutes or so.  
  
“Okay, so, it’s just that I—,” he takes a deep breath, “I really like you, a lot, probably too much when I think about it, since we barely just met.”

His poor grandmother used to comment that her Samuel was always so good with words, so thoughtful when he expressed himself.  
_Há, grandma, look at me now._

Bucky pulls his hand slowly back and looks at him, because they never say nice things to each other except when they are too sleepy to lie or too frustrated with each other to forget they’re supposed not to name what’s between them.  
  
Sam’s breaking the rules.

“What I mean to say is—”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Sam,” Bucky says. He sounds thorn, but Sam must have imagined it, because when he continues he sounds monotone, disinterested, like it doesn’t matter to him at all, “whatever idea you have of me, it’s not real.”

“And even though I—“, Bucky’s shoulders shudder. He looks away. “It doesn’t matter, this partnership will be over once we reach the grave.”

Sam has faced rejection before. It’s hard to imagine he knows, being so handsome and charming, having legs that equal Naomie Harris’ and all that, but before he got the only one he was supposed to protect killed, the one he loved, he was young and fearless and he dared all the time.

But this rejection, this stings. Perhaps because he has only just been relearning that it is possible to feel this way again.  
Most of all it hurts because he thought there was something there. That it meant something.   
How he feels calm around Bucky even though his heart beats twice as fast when blue eyes meet brown.  
  
The mountain sighs and understands. The winds kisses Sam’s cheeks were tears do not fall. He holds himself together.  
The falcon rubs against him, like a cat. Perhaps he wants another piece of cake.

He knows Bucky and him are good for one another. He has seen the changes in both of them. If it took a lifetime of never-ending hikes between mountains and rivers for Bucky to admit that, Sam would do it.

But Bucky doesn’t want him. And Sam’s not a bad person even though he’s not a good person either. He swallows his pride and his pain.  
Pain that crumbles inside of him and floods his veins.

“I understand,” he says and he can’t help but be happy to see that Bucky isn’t crawling into that overly formal persona he has, but instead his shoulders hang low, peaceful.  
Sam’ll chose resignation over anxiety any day.

“I won’t bring it up again,” although Sam says knowing fully well that every time Bucky looks at him, something inside him will turn, like an hourglass restarting the count of grains of sand. The crumbs of his heartache.   
And every time Bucky smiles, Sam will smile back and lose a little bit more of his heart to him.  
  
“I’ll pack the tent.”  
Sam stands up and walks away. He doesn’t look back for some time and doesn’t hear Bucky’s reply. His hands are sticky and his eyes wet.

The wishes in Bucky's whispered response get lost in the wind.

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Couscous with fermented milk, also known as Saykouk, is quite delicious!
> 
> All shall be revealed in 'the Beast', better known as chapter 4, since it's getting so huge.  
> This time I'll stay under 10.000 words for once, I thought, well, never mind that.
> 
> Keep in mind that the events up to CA: TWS are basically canon in this story as well. Except Steve's plane went down in New England instead of the Arctic, mostly because I know more about New England and nothing at all about the Arctic, and for obvious plot reasons haha. Although Sam would probably have bought a cottage in the Arctic if it was a possibility.... who knows ;)


	4. Winter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to my wonderful beta Jewel <3 <3  
> You can also thank her that for the fact that there will be a fifth chapter!  
> The rating for this chapter is higher than the rest of the story, but because it's only a small part of this chapter I haven't changed the overall rating. But yeah, it's bit closer to mature now ;).  
> And again, serious warnings for suicide/suicidal ideation. For those concerned, there is no major character death. (Besides obviously what happened to Steve and Bucky in TFA & TWS.)

The next few days pass easily. Easier than Sam expected. Sam thinks about Riley and what it would feel like to fly again.  
Most of all he thinks about Bucky, but that’s a given.  
  
He talks to Han the falcon a lot, turns out the bird has a better sense of humor than anticipated, once he stops meddling in Sam’s love life.   
Now he simply sighs every time Sam mentions the B-word in a longing way (that’s Bucky if that wasn’t clear yet).  
_(‘Stop whining and do something about it! You know, when one falcon loves another falcon very much—‘)_  
  
He also disagrees with his nickname, had suggested ‘the Prince of Wilderness’, but Sam refused and gave him the choice between Han Solo and Redwing.  
Han it was.  
Sam can’t believe his second best friend in the world is an opinionated bird.  
  
Trees are slowly turning red and yellow and summer releases the last sighs of her warm breath over them. In other words, Sam is sweating more than should humanly be possible. He’s wet everywhere and not in a sexy way at all.  
Not even in an endearing way, _aaah look at that poor creature struggle._ Nope. He oozes pure disgust.

The nightmares have returned, but it isn’t like in New York, or worse, DC, waking everyone up in a ten - mile radius screaming for his best friend not to die. 

Every night Sam tastes ash and hears Riley shout to catch him. He only watches.  
Although he continues to wake up drenched in sweat and fear, _not fun at all,_ most of the time it’s no longer a pine branch waiting for him. It’s Bucky. Who doesn’t assure him everything is all right, just asks if he’s ever heard of Penelope’s dream of the eagle killing twenty geese. 

Bucky wakes him with soft touches and even softer smiles. The yearning returns tenfold and sometimes, only sometimes, Sam touches the patchy beard in return with barely a hint of sorrow left.  
   
And it’s not as awkward as expected either.  
  
During one particular bad night Bucky hugs him properly for the first time. It's warm and gentle. Bucky's arms hold him tight and Sam wants to disappear in his embrace forever. Lay his head on Bucky’s breastbone and forget. Turn to stone.  
The way Bucky’s shoulders shudder as he holds Sam, he might feel the same way.  
  
Basically he’s dealing pretty well, considering. Sam’s becoming less and less afraid of falling asleep.

* * *

  
“Reminds me of those Georgia O’Keeffe paintings,” Bucky says looking at the valley below and the mountains afar.  
  
They’ve stopped to eat lunch, omelet with cheese this time.  
  
Sometimes (most of the time) Sam doesn’t understand Bucky at all.  
  
“She lived in New Mexico. This looks absolutely nothing alike,” Sam says.  
  
Bucky looks at him as though he doesn’t appreciate the fine arts as much as he should and clearly doesn’t understand the similarities between the oeuvre of miss O’Keeffe and New England’s valleys. Or perhaps he didn't mean her landscapes, but drew a comparison between their view and her vagina-flowers.  
Who knows. Sam certainly doesn’t.

Bucky’s speech is changing bit by bit. Sam notices he also thinks less about what he wants to say. He just does it. English comes more and more naturally to him and even an accent creeps in.  
  
“You’re from New York or somethin’?” Sam asks him, imitating the worst Brooklyn accent on earth.  
  
Bucky looks surprised, interrupted mid-rant on female artists in American Modernism.  
“Maybe? Wait, what the hell kinda accent was that?”  
  
“Guess which one this is,” Sam says and tries to embody a Finn.

* * *

Bucky is truly a strange one. This Sam had already concluded (if the reader forgot, he recommends reading the first chapter again. “A corpse technically” was already the last fucking straw for Sam, he wonders what yours was). 

Sam talks to birds after all, he can’t really hold anything against anyone.

But Sam hadn’t realised that Bucky was strange in a more fundamental way, like having no shadow.   
He tries not to comment on it. But the lack of shadow is confusing, to say the least.   
And nobody said anything about it being rude to stare. Bucky seems used to his staring by now. 

Sam doesn’t say anything, he just notices. 

And while he’s noticing, not saying anything and obsessing about Bucky’s weird knuckly hands, Sam dedicates himself to the role of guide.  
That is, after all, what Bucky is paying him for, not for his foolish crush nor a chance to find out together what  it  is to be human again.  
Who cares about that,  when one can  get shat  upon by birds and develop an uncomfortable everlasting rash during a hike from hell?  
Mostly this means Sam walks in front of Bucky (to prevent him from walking purposely slow) and points out different kind of birds.  
  
“Look, the Yellow Nuthatch! Wait, no, no, it’s a Huston’s Revenge!”  
  
“What a rare sighting of the Blue-tailed talk-a-lot. I must tell my 21 twitter followers immediately! Never mind that North American humpmouse we saw earlier, although when it comes to favorites I gotta say, it’s a tie between the Red-Breasted Tit and the Lazy Horned Piper.”  
  
“Gee, Buck, did ya did see that gorgeous specimen of a Frilled Coquette earlier? Did ya??”  
  
Bucky doesn't even know Sam is making most of these up.

Regardless of Sam's enforced distance between them, Bucky seeks him out, acting like that wild and curious fox again, and Sam wonders if he is  capable  of being cruel. Or if he simply doesn’t notice how he tilts his head when Sam rambles on about Black-Capped Chickadee ( _look_ it’s super cute alright) and smiles every unspoken secret away like it’s nothing.

Like he doesn’t see how his right hand lingers against Sam's cheek when they  lie  side by side in their tent.

As if he hadn't said,  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Sam." 

Sam knows that the person that was pulled apart and  put  back together again isn’t quite there anymore.

And so perhaps, like Sam, Bucky's experiencing his own metamorphosis. Their encounter is changing something fundamentally,  and lose sand never built strong houses.  
Bucky’s  fraying  at the edges, reinventing himself, rediscovering what matters to him.

That might be the reason  why  despite his refusal and rejection of Sam, Bucky continues to search for excuses to touch Sam. Those excuses become less and less frequent. They never were necessary to Sam anyway, he welcomed them, secretly, but to see Bucky let go of them and just dare, it makes something churn low in Sam’s belly.   
A low heat spreads across his limbs.

Bucky brings up the garlic obsession. (“Honestly, Bucky, it’s _not_ an obsession, even if you eat it every day. Every normal person knows that garlic makes every dish better, except for cakes obviously. But you know what, even then…”)

Sam finds out that Bucky hates the word ‘ferment’ more than most people hate the word ‘moist’.

Bucky brushes their shoulders together again and again and stars fall from the sky when he does so.

* * *

  
Sam's looking forward to finally arriving at the cabin where he can have a nice long shower (and jerk off of course. Sorry. But it’s gotta be said, it’s been two weeks of semi-one-sided sexual tension, emotional whiplashes and weird-ass specific Bucky behaviour that turns Sam on at the most inconvenient moments, like the one time Bucky snorted tea out of his nose. How is that even a little sexually appealing?) and then he’s going to try to sleep in an actual bed and not on the ground.  
  
There’s still an hour left to walk and the sun is setting, so they have set a fast pace.   
At times he’s felt lost at what to do. (Not actually lost, obviously, he knows the way pretty well and otherwise Han is there to kindly point out all of Sam’s wrong turns and decisions). But with the cottage approaching he feels out of depth more than ever before. He feels slightly twisted, unbalanced and he isn’t sure why. It feels like he's wearing thin, but with what?

He’s  decided he really hates hiking after all. Don’t tell his father .  
  
Bucky moves soundlessly a few steps behind him, never sweaty, never with shallow breaths, like he’s not quite there. Another thing Sam has noticed. He only makes sound when he does it on purpose.

Leaves flutter, grass waves in the wind, and somewhere nearby water rushes past.  
  
“Once,” Bucky starts suddenly from behind Sam, breaking the echo of Sam’s raspy gasps. "You were a soldier, weren’t you?"

Bucky rarely starts conversations, never mind about ‘personal’ things.   
Not in the easy _I’ve got nothing to lose anyway and I’m awkward at starting our daily chats-manner_ that Sam has.  
So even though Sam doesn't want to talk about it, like ever, he doesn't want to discourage Bucky.  
  
He comes to a halt. The sand underneath his feet makes a weird cracking sound.  
Bucky almost bumps against him. 

The sun is low and everything is covered in pink light. The air has cooled down. He hears only his own heart beating in his chest. An erratic thump thump. So loud he knows Bucky can hear it too.  
  
He stares at his hands. Maybe he's thin with finality, not potential.

_Yes,_ Sam wants to say _, but I don’t know if it was an identity or simply a job. I don’t know if I am no longer a soldier at all, with the way I think and the way I act._

He looks towards the path before them. It runs steep and uneven between the dark overgrown rocks.  
  
“I was, yeah. For a long time it’s all I was, really. There was nothing else, my duty, my friends. But what you don’t think about is that  when you stop, you lose more than a job. Funny how that goes. Not that that is important anymore. I suppose I haven’t been for some time now, or at least I have tried not to be. It’s better that way, or at least, I hope so.”

Sam huffs and hesitates just a brief moment before he continues.  
  
“In the end, it was a very simple thing that made me quit. A… friend of mine was killed. Actually no— _I_ got him killed. I fucking watched and didn't do a thing. After that, well.”  
  
Sam swallows the rest of his thoughts away. It’s a lid he doesn’t want to unscrew.

Bucky is silent for an almost-eternity. He puts his right hand on Sam's right shoulder. Mirroring his pose. Squeezes softly. He’s so terribly close to Sam, almost touching him back to chest, heart to heart. Too real.  
Sam still doesn't hear his breath, but feels Bucky’s exhalation against the back of his neck. 

“I understand,” Bucky says and Sam wants to scream that, _no_ , he doesn’t. No one does. No one else was there. His face is wet, but it isn't raining. He keeps looking forward, doesn't turn to Bucky.  
  
“I wasn’t there to protect mine either. They told me, some time after they caught me.” 

Bucky laughs suddenly without joy , the sound too loud for the evening.

“Perhaps it’s different than I remember, as little as I do, but in my memories it seems that it  didn’t matter what they did to me, because his voice would come to me and tell me to keep fighting. ‘For justice,’ he would say. But, well, but--”

A soldier’s  _but_ , a soldiers unfinished unspoken second half of a lost sentence.

Bucky makes a strange sound this time, the air he exhales into Sam’s ear sound like _but what can ya do, ya know?_

“They were happy, gleeful, when they told me his plane had, uh, that it had crashed and all that was left of him was a nameless grave— I suppose I had given up on ‘the American way’ for some time already. But then, when they said his name, then I stopped all together. The fighting, I mean. It just didn't seem like anything was worth it anymore. Cowardice won. And because of that... decision, not just him, not just me, but so many, many, countless others died. ”  
  
Perhaps Bucky means the words as a kindness, to show they have something in common, but the words, they extinguish the anger inside Sam.  
Instead he’s taken by horror and anguish.

“Bucky,” Sam says understanding the severity of his confession. He turns around to face the other man. 

Some things must be said face to face. 

Bucky’s eyes shine bright with guilt.  
  
“You had _no_ choice. It’s not a choice when you have no freedom to  choose . But when you did, you came here, looking for me.”   
And _him_.

“No, I should have—,” Bucky responds, stopping mid-sentence. He runs his gloved hand through his hair.  
“I don’t know. It doesn't matter. When it mattered, I did what I did and I gave up knowing what that meant.”

“Jesus Christ. It’s _not_ your fault. You did everything you could. I know this, I know _you_ ,” Sam says.   
  
He moves his hand towards Bucky’s face, but drops it just before the touch reaches his jaw.  
Bucky stares at him, soul exposed, his eyes frantically searching Sam’s face. He wonders what Bucky finds.

Bucky throws it back at him, “I’ll start believing that the moment you do.”

Sam isn’t sure whether that’s about Sam’s lie of Bucky’s one. He tries to smile, caught, truth too close to comfort. 

They  breathe  in tandem.

“Every time Death came, I begged for her to take me with her, until she did, which got me into this mess.” Bucky waves his hand uncharacteristically around him, like Sam would to do to indicate their hike.  
  
Bucky holds Sam’s gaze in way he has never looked at Sam before.

For  a fleeting second Sam believes Bucky’s about to kiss him.

He breaks eye-contact.

* * *

 

How Sam longs for a proper mattress and his own room, he can almost feel it as they stumble inside the cabin. It's much smaller than he remembered, but that is a certainty that comes with ageing. 

Everything looms larger when you’re a kid.  
  
He drops his bag unceremoniously on the floor and stumbles like a desperate man in a desert in search for water towards the bedroom. Or in his case, Sam supposes, a man on the mountains haunted by talkative birds hunting for a proper pillow.  
  
Bucky follows closely behind him, with his steps that no one can hear, because he’s a ghost and in cahoots with Death, or whatever. Sam’s too tired to come up with proper descriptions.  
  
He’s so close, he can almost taste it, if stuffy cabin-beds had a recognizable taste besides dust. Actually, he definitely tastes dust in the air.  
He opens the door and feasts his eyes on the miracle before—

There is only one bed. 

_Oh fuckity fuck._

It’s a single twin bed.  
A fucking twin bed. And the second one is clearly absent.  
What’s with the name anyway. Twin bed? You can barely fit a child into it, never mind a pair of twins!?

_(Yes he knows why they’re called that way, but seriously, it makes no sense when the second one is missing!)_

_Why why why_ is he being punished like this, the tent was awkward enough while trying to hide a hard-on. But now a fucking twin bed.  
(Yes his libido has returned, thank you very much sergeant J.B. Barnes.)

“Dibs,” Bucky simply says and Sam is not sure what to be more shocked by, Bucky’s use of colloquialisms that he has never used before or that he just lost the bed.

“No, no, no! Not happening. I’m sleeping in that bed.”

“Well, I’m not sleeping on the ground. You don’t even sleep in a bed at home,” Bucky mocks Sam.

“Yes, uh, this mattress looks like a great therapist, ready to solve all my traumas,” Sam bites back (while absolutely not thinking about how Bucky calls Sam’s cottage home).  
He pats the bed, which is about as soft as a rock, ouch. But he keeps petting it like it’s exactly what he wished for.

Bucky shows his teeth, Sam snarls.

“Very well then,” Bucky says. “We’re going to have to share.”

“Right, great idea!” Sam utters, “I mean, what could possibly go wrong? After the whole tent-experience that we both enjoyed so much and me professing my interest in you and then you rejecting me— Fuck everything!“  
  
Sam dramatically throws his arms in the air.

“You know that’s not—“ 

Sam cuts Bucky off. And yes, he knows that’s not really how it went or how it has been, between them, not anymore, but he’s on a roll okay, let him finish his goddamn rant for once.  
  
“Anyway, after all of that, we’re going to share a tiny mattress, that’s not even going to fit one of us on it, but noooo, you want to put _both_ of us on it.  I mean, for god’s sake, you probably wouldn’t even fit on it by yourself, with your abnormally large arms.”  
  
Bucky stares at him, a small smile playing on his lips. Sam rambles on.  
  
“Great idea, you’re a genius Bucky. I’m sorry I’ve been insulting your intelligence all this time. Turns out you’re fucking Einstein reincarnated!”

Bucky’s judgmental eyebrows reply  _you done?_ They even have Brooklyn accent in them. The world is coming to an end.

“Okay. Then give up the bed.”

“Never.”  
  
Bucky simply smirks. Sam can't stand him. Why is he like this, all... rumpled and gorgeous and annoying.

Sam breathes in deeply, and out. He turns around towards the shower angrily. Before he slams the door behind him, he shouts back, “this does _not_ mean I give up the bed!” 

“Already called dibs anyway!”

Sam pretends he didn’t hear that.

* * *

Bucky has put the mattress down on the floor. He’s changed into his long shirt and his sleeping pants as well. Previously known as Sam’s yoga pants that made his butt look great.

Sam’s clothes make Bucky look soft and handsome and Sam’s heart squeezes. 

Sam feels he might have a heart attack one of these days.  
  
“Well, this is going to be uncomfortable for both of us.” Sam swears he doesn’t stare. “Better get it over with.”  
Sam takes off his slippers.

“You’re wearing the glove to bed,” he notices, “uh, I’m actually strangely into that." 

Sam’s new approach to the whole unrequited love-thing is to just wear his heart on his sleeve. Bucky seems to have accepted Sam’s way of dealing with ease anyway. 

The wings of the butterflies in his stomach will beat either way, why not let them fly for a little bit.  
  
Time’s almost up after all. But Sam feels for the first time in his life that he hasn’t wasted it. Not one little bit, not a second too much. Yes, he’s nervous about tomorrow, but whatever will happens, it was worth it. That’s not a notion he is familiar with anymore. 

Besides that, he’s also really fucking curious about Bucky’s friendly corpse.  


Bucky laughs, loudly. Laughs properly the first time since Sams confession (which in reality was only a simple _I like you_ , not even the whole story. And it was weeks ago, seriously.) Like he is forgiving Sam for having  fallen in love with a phantom like him.  


Sam crawls next to Bucky  on  the bed, the two of them shoulder to  shoulder  with their backs to the wall. It feels like they are an old married couple that has been together for over forty years that only has sex once every two weeks at 9pm on a Thursday.

The worst thing is, Sam wouldn’t mind a bit if that was actually the case. But instead all he can think about is how warm Bucky’s body is next to him, how broad his shoulders are, how lovely his collarbones, and how he still hasn’t managed to learn how to think a boner away.     
He has had fifteen years of experience, he should have developed that skill by now.

This is going to be glorious hell.

Bucky, of course, interrupts his  spiraling  and says with a rough voice, out of breath, (he’s never out of breath and he certainly hasn’t gone for a run so where did that come from??),  “ it’s very easy to love someone who has died, don’t you think? You forget about all their flaws and everything that made them human instead of a dead body.”

It feels like a continuation of their conversation two hours before. When it felt for a second that everything had shifted and Bucky had stared at Sam, instead of the other way around.  
It feels... important.  Like a question that’s been on Bucky’s mind for a while now.  
And Sam knows for sure Bucky isn’t talking about the dead man in the mountains or Riley.

Sam wants to deny everything, but somehow instead the following comes out, “don’t worry, Buck, you have more than enough flaws for me to ever forget you’re alive and kicking. Especially kicking."  
  
(Sam’s thinking of the bruises on his legs from sleeping next to Bucky.)  
  
“And don’t even get me started about all the chewing, _Jesus F. Christ._ How hard can it be to eat with your mouth closed?” 

It’s not romantic nor very funny, but Bucky looks at him for way too long again, _uh awkward, right?_   Sam gets it now, the staring. It’s weird, and rude. He should have definitely done that less.  
And it’s not Bucky’s toothy grin that he is smiling. No, his mouth forms small smile of surprise and his eyes are a little lost.  
He’s beautiful. So goddamn beautiful.  
  
Very rarely Sam says all the right things, completely by accident.  
Sam suddenly _gets_ it. That Bucky's convinced he can’t be loved after what he has done, the shadows and the blood he spoke about during the nights in the tents.  
The reason he wears a glove.  
Always scared  to touch but always longing for it nonetheless. Desperately in need of love, but unwilling to believe he deserves it.  
Completely touch deprived since the 1940s. What does that do to a person?  
  
_There being another person near me who is kind._

He knows that Bucky’s single statement  that it’s very easy to love someone who has died has changed something between them, the unspoken is spoken, the taboo is no longer taboo.

Sam hopes, at least, that this is Bucky’s way of showing him that he's changed how he feels about Sam’s confession, or maybe he hasn’t changed his opinion, simply his answer. 

It seems anything is on the table now. Something thrilling and scary shoots through Sam’s body, the  realization  that nothing is the same as before.

It’s only rarely that us mortals (who frankly have no deal with any kind of  harbinger  of Death at all) are confronted with fate, or  a choice between two alternative universes, or whatever you wanna call it: with a choice that you know will change everything. But it isn’t Sam who decides which path to follow at the crossing of destinies.

No, it isn't.  
Under the blanket Bucky grabs Sam’s hand like a lifeline.   
Whatever hope Bucky cherished that made him begin the hike, it seems no longer relevant for it’s been replaced by a smile with a gap.

* * *

For the rest of the evening Bucky keeps holding his hand. Sam screams internally a lot, feels like dancing without music and the way he squeezes Bucky's hand too firmly he’s pretty sure Bucky knows. Bucky’s grip is just as strong.  


Bucky keeps stealing glances, trails his hand occasionally up Sam’s arm, almost squeezes his bicep, but Bucky’s  too classy for that apparently. Or has great self-control, who knows?

Sam feels overwhelmed. Bucky's careful touches become more daring as the evening continues. They are light and barely there, but so very addicting. Bucky's acting like he's never done this before, and he might not have, like he's discovering for the first time what another person skin can feel like against your own, how goosebumps form when Bucky brushes his fingers over Sam's collarbones. How Bucky feels himself when he's allowed to touch without expectations, but instead with a desire to venture, indulge, seek pleasure even.  
  
But however nice the wordless flirting is and _you know_ , being wanted, but Sam can’t help but wonder about the next day. About the timing of Bucky’s forwardness. Their journey will come to an end and Sam doesn’t really know who or what Bucky is. Yes, Sam knows Bucky’s history, partially, but not what happened to him after the Winter Soldier was freed.

Nor does he know the actual reason that Bucky wants to find the grave. Sam admittedly didn’t question it before and has made a lot of assumptions (to be honest most theories concern the topic of resurrection), but that was all _before_ , when he didn’t know Bucky and he was only a guide. He's no longer just a guide.  
  
Sam has so many doubts, but doesn’t know where to begin and how to formulate the questions that give him the answers he need. Everything is hazy. Whenever he feels he’s getting close to the truth, it escapes him like moonlight shining through his hands.  
  
Most of all, Sam worries why Bucky came to him. There is something he needs to ask, needs to know,but it's a question that’s he kept to himself since that first day when he waited between his sunflowers for Bucky to notice him.  
  
“So, what’s with the no shadow thing?” Sam starts. He likes to remind y’all that he is great at conversation-openers.  
  
“You noticed that, huh?”  
  
“I notice a lot more than people give me credit for,” Sam responds.

Sam’s known for a while now, he’s just really good at fooling himself. Their dream together is so lovely, almost a little too nice to be real, right?  
The way everything was so surreal, how the days passed so quickly. Seasons changing.  The arrival of a stranger who  understands him and challenges him.   
His ability to heal and deal with his trauma. One bed, _come on._  
And most importantly, his ability to speak to birds? Seriously? That one truly sounds entirely made up. 

And now, all his desires manifesting, almost like a last gift.

“And the way you kept talking about her, like she was a stranger and a sister at the same time, that was pretty obvious, because you are Death herself, aren’t you?”

“Yes, well, one of the many servants,” Bucky answers, softly and with honesty. “She’s called _Марена_. But there are many gods and goddesses of Death, as many as there are people, and they in  turn have many that serve them. Some call them recruits, or harbingers, even psychopomps.”

“When did _I,_ you know…” Sam makes a choking sound like he’s suffocating. Finally finding the courage to ask. He wonders when he did it, probably just before Bucky arrived to carry his soul to the next realm and all that. “Because, well, to be honest, I have seriously been wondering whether I’m going to heaven or hell,” Sam muses.  
“It’s been really hard to tell, you know, all things considered. On the one side, a hike up a mountain with some over-invested birds does sound exactly like a reinvention of purgatory, but then on the other side, I didn’t mind the company so much, even if it is a Slavic god with a Brooklyn accent.”  
Sam winks, not sure why he does that.  
  
Bucky looks at him shocked, eye large and wide.

“You didn’t, Sam.  _Sam_ ,” he chokes out, pained. “Fuck, you didn't kill yourself. I haven’t taken your soul to ‘ferry’ it to the next world, or anything like that. How could you think that?”  
  
“Well, excuse me," Sam spits out, "how was I supposed to know? All I think about is killing myself, then a gorgeous dude comes to my cottage. Which is, by the way, in the middle of fucking nowhere so God knows why anyone would come there, and tells me to take him up the mountain to find a fucking corpse!”  
  
He’s upset, why is he upset about being alive?

How was his assumption not the obvious one? 

Why  had he felt  the appeal to agree  to  a request like Bucky’s when there was no reason to? If it was the money he  had done  it for, he would surely not have left it on the kitchen table? Or how about the fact that he can talk to birds and they actually talk back? Or  that  he wasn’t shocked by any of Bucky’s horror-stories or supernatural strength? But kinda never thought about it, like he wasn’t quite there. Like he had left his body behind already?

You never wondered about that reader and many of the other things Sam did?  
  
But apparently he’s not dead. Maybe he’s just regular old plain crazy. And alive, which means that everything that happened really happened.  
It’s real, and it’s been so good, so fucking good, so how can that be?  
Sam never got that, never deserved that, he was supposed to rot away in a cottage but instead he sort of likes himself now and he feels hopeful. How could have it been real?

“I thought you were just lazy, or working the graveyard shift _(há_ _see what he did there)_ gathering up all the souls in the New England countryside before you went down below again. Maybe you hate walking stairs. —Wait, are there stairs, in Slavic mythology? — And I thought, perhaps you felt weird about fucking a ghost, that’s why you were so reluctant?”

In case of existential crisis, ramble on. 

He pulls Bucky’s hand up together with his own, shaking it around. As  if  to say, _see under-the-cover handholding equals practically ghost-fucking!! No glow-in-the-dark-lube required_.  
  
The way Bucky looks at him is a face full of fondness, a little bit of pity, no longer abhorred.  
  
“I swear you aren’t dead. Neither are you a ghost. And neither are we currently fucking.”  
Bucky shakes their hands  a  little more as well.  
  
Sam isn’t sure what to do. The surprise and panic have  calmed down and he’s definitely glad  about  being not-dead, because turns out life isn’t quite like hell on earth and things are kinda all right when you think about it?  
(Except for the prison industrial complex, racist murdering cops,  neo-colonialism and gentrification in Detroit, to name a few…..)

But how is he going to do this? Live well? 

“You longed for it so much, those first days we were together,” Bucky says, interrupting Sam’s thoughts. His voice is rasping, overcome with sudden emotion of the memory.

Sam wonders whether Bucky became Death’s servant that way. After all the torture he endured, he longed for her and she came and made him a deal.  
She, who feels nothing, pitied the puppet soldier.  
  
Bucky answers him before he can ask.  
“I made a deal and traded one kind of servitude for another. Serving her until a new deal would come along. So yeah, I came to the cottage because I needed someone to guide me. But now, it’s nothing like that anymore, and I don’t want her to take you, _ever_.”  
  
Preventing Death from doing her work sounds like a bad work ethic.  
  
Bucky's grip on Sam’s hand is ironclad. Immortal almost.

“Well, yeah, obviously, because you need my help,” Sam grins, weakly, offering Bucky a way out of the line of conversation, “a guide to your journey of self-discovery and sexual identity.” He may or may not have used a jazz hand when he said that.

Bucky’s laugh is dry and high. He’s not choosing an easy way out.

“Yes, perhaps. Because of unfinished business and past love,” Bucky sighs, “but then the guide turned out to be you. And you were different and better than anything I expected. And obsessed with made-up birds, Star Wars and garlic.”  
And _you_ , Sam thinks.

Bucky says it with such simplicity and dedication, the kind he had when he was James Buchanan Barnes, 1942.  
Sam blushes. He hangs his head. He wonders how much of a charmer Bucky used to be.  
  
“Hey Sam,” Bucky says, he puts his left gloved hand on Sam’s jaw, turning his face towards him.  
  
“I don’t care about my deal anymore, she can find me the day after tomorrow, take me back, but until then, let’s stay here.”  
_Wait, what deal exactly?_  
“Please Sam, let’s not lose another day. Let's stay, one last day.”  
  
Sam touches Bucky’s hand with own, covering it.  
  
"And leave your corpsy friend hanging, Buck?” Sam says, thinking of Riley and what he would do given the opportunity to raise him from death.   
He can’t let Bucky do that. He can’t let Bucky give that up.

“I know we can’t, but I don’t want to lose you, don’t make me lose you as well, please, Sam,” he whispers. Bucky sounds young, on the edge of tears.  
Almost as though he wants to say more, but can’t.  
  
Why is Bucky so worried? Finding the grave and Bucky’s friend won’t change anything between, right? Sam was worried about that before, but it seems Bucky is certain in his affections. 

“You won’t Bucky, I promise, whatever happens tomorrow, we'll stick together alright?" Sam tries to assure Bucky, but Bucky's mournful eyes stare at him with too much sorrow. "I'm sure you have some vacation left or is the labor contract really terrible in the afterlife? We'll spend our summers at the cottage and I’ll cook other colors for you and you'll try to tan and we'll do yoga together, okay?  
  
Bucky smiles, softly. “You’re an idiot.”

_Yeah, but it made you smile_ , Sam thinks, Bucky’s hand still on his jaw.

“Okay,” Bucky says. Finish the mission. “Promise?”

“With my life,” Sam answers.

Tomorrow will be the 20th of December, the day before winter begins. Impossible like everything.  Spring will certainly come early this year. 

* * *

  
Sam is on fire. It’s the middle of the night and Bucky ’s back against Sam is hot. Burning hot.  Its heat  pulses in waves against Sam. How desperately Sam wishes to turn around and wrap his arms around Bucky’s torso. But he can’t. 

All he can do is  lie  there and suffer in silence. After the tent-nights, he expected it to be less awkward, but he supposes when one’s butt touches another person’s butt in a bed that’s too small, then tension is born naturally.  
But he won't touch Bucky without Bucky’s expressed consent.  
Despite having mentioned the f-word while squeezing the life out of each other's hands, Bucky’s still has a traumatic relationship with  his own body. It took him weeks before he was able to touch Sam casually without being overwhelmed.

What will happen if that touch is no longer casual ?

He can hear Bucky sigh out deeply, roughly, calming himself down or … enjoying it?

_Fuck_ , how is Sam going to get through this night?

Yet, like always, they dare to do more during the night than in the light of day.

Bucky rolls over and grunts. His light eyes stand out in the dark, ever too intense. Two Polar stars.

Sam stares back, like he normally does, but this time, Bucky shivers.

“You continue to confuse me,” Sam whispers. 

Bucky’s mouth hangs open. Pink and  debauched , before it's been even touched. Like he  has been biting  on it the whole night long.  
Bucky surely must know what sight he makes and his eyes say he isn’t even a bit sorry.

Bucky slowly crawls towards Sam, movements sure and confident. In control.  
It turns Sam on even more. To watch those muscles move, his strong shoulders and his gorgeous chest are practically visible through the thin shirt.  
He stares and stares and stares, but still doesn’t touch. The tension is rising and pours in  waves over them and through the room, like a living creature.   
  
_Thump thump_ his heartbeat goes.

Bucky stops, moments away from Sam’s own body. A body that tingles and finally feels right. Not so thin anymore, not so doubtful.  
Sam exhales a shuttering sigh. Leans on his elbows and Bucky waits.  
He can work with this.

“You want me to keep going?”

Sam can barely find the breath he needs to push out for a pleading confirmation. It sounds high and slightly hysterical to him, which he is, in a good way.  
If Bucky got on with it. They haven’t even touched yet. _Fuck_.  
  
Bucky pushes his face against the column of Sam’s throat and inhales. He lowers himself slowly on Sam, like honey dripping his limbs grow closer and closer, and it only adds to the tension. Sam’s heartbeat goes faster and faster.  

Bucky's body weighs heavy on Sam’s. It grounds them, heavenly.

Sam lets his head fall back immediately, showing his neck. A contrast to Bucky’s syrupy movements, Sam’s are quick, impulsive, indulging.  
Bucky moves from his to throat to his collarbone and kisses it softly, his beard softly scratching Sam’s skin.  
Growing bolder, he sucks a bruise where Sam’s neck meets his shoulder, hard. Sam gasps and releases a moan so loud, he hopes every bird in the perimeter has left.

_Please please please let Han have fucked off,_ Sam doesn’t want any smartass comments from anyone in the morning. Least of all the prince of the fucking wilderness.

Why he is thinking of birds when he has Bucky this close?  

He moves his hands slowly from both Bucky’s sides to his broad strong back, over his shoulder blades, rubbing slowly up and down. Slightly pushing him closer to Sam. Bucky moves fluidly with him.

But soon Sam grows  impatient  too. Now that he can have it, he wants more. He needs more.

“Bucky, _Buck_ , please,” Sam pleads, _no_ , begs. His voice sounds distant and scratchy, they’ve barely passed PG-13, no clothes have been dramatically torn off and he’s already this lost. Basically paralyzed with lust and stuff like, _emotions_.  
He’s royally fucked.  
  
Well, actually, he definitely wants to be royally fucked, if only Bucky got on board with that plan.  
He arches up against Bucky, pushing his hands under Buck’s shirt, although he avoids the left arm. He tries to press close, closer and closest.  
Wishing for nothing more than getting lost in each  other’s bodies.  
  
He grinds his hips up against Bucky’s. Impatient.   
The move has Bucky shivering. His pink mouth falls open, and he returns the move, rolling his hips expertly. 

Sam knows he’s letting out sounds, but he has no control over it. He loses himself completely in the feeling. 

“Your voice, face, fuck, everything about you,” is all that Bucky says, breath hitching.  
It feels so good, so fucking good. Where the hell did Bucky learn to do that?  
  
And they’re definitely both hard, it’s glorious in every possible way. He wonders why they waited so long. Can’t rationally remember the reasons why.  
Sam wants everything, and he wants it now, keeps whispering it,  _now now now_ , begging,  _Buck, please, please, Buck, please_.

As though he’s become keenly attuned to Sam's mentally  spiraling  out of place, Bucky stops the movement. He kisses Sam’s chest, right above the heart. Puts his hand there. And then he moves away, to the side of the bed.  
  
_Noo, no,_ he’s not allowed to remove his gorgeous body away. Sam tries to pull him back, but with his ' abnormally' strong hand on Sam’s chest, he keeps Sam in place easily. 

And apparently that’s a thing for Sam. _Yes_ , it definitely is. Sam moans loudly.  
  
With his other hand, Bucky’s patting the floor next to the mattress, like he’s looking for something. Bucky makes a triumphant sound when he finds whatever he was searching for and holds it up.  
  
In the dark room the lube glows like something extraterrestrial. 

Sam shrieks. Buckys grin is wide. 

They both start laughing, loudly, their emotions pouring into  the  room, into the mattress and the cabin. Joy and happiness.  
The click of the bottle being brings another salvo over them both. They simply can’t seem to stop. Kroger’s gift to the world.

“You make everything real,” Bucky whispers, once they’ve calmed down again, the sound muffled against Sam’s breastbone.  
  
Bucky looks up, eyes kind and curious, mouth a beautiful smile.  
“You still want to go on?” Sam asks.  _The journey to the grave or the sex?_ Sam thinks. 

And Bucky says yes, to both, without hesitation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> None of the birds are real except for, believe it or not, the Frilled Coquette, which is a hummingbird that does look like what one imagines when someone says "that's a frilled coquette!!" For years I thought it as called fried coquette, oh well.  
> Black-capped chickadee  is real as well, and the only bird that actually one can find in New England, and the are truly super cute.


End file.
